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dunk / skidata

Maps to show the locations of various ski resorts in Europe, with named labels displayed on the map.
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Closed michaelbaudino closed 11 years ago

michaelbaudino commented 11 years ago

Amazing piece of work !

Just out of curiosity, where does the data comes from ? Is it usable freely (you did not specify any license) ?

michaelbaudino commented 11 years ago

I can see URLs to http://sionvalais.com in snowlocations. Is the data extracted from http://sionvalais.com, or is it designed to be used on http://sionvalais.com ?

dunk commented 11 years ago

Yup, I just grabbed the data from http://skiweather.eu/snowmap and made it work with the marker-with-label.js. I was kind of annoyed that I couldn't find a map with the ski resorts in the Alps labeled on it. It seemed so simple and basic!

I have them hosted here: http://duncang.com/skidata/map-all.html (that was geo data from skiweather) http://duncang.com/skidata/map-even-more.html (that was geo data from bergfex, I think) http://duncang.com/skidata/map-top.html (this one is the top Alpine ski resorts - everything over a certain height, with a certain minimum number of runs)

Glad you found it useful! For working out the "top" resorts I bought data from these guys: http://snow24.com, though I can't publish that as they make their money by licensing it (recommended though - it's great!)

michaelbaudino commented 11 years ago

Ho thanks for all those answers ! Are you working in the ski industry, or did you just did that for fun ? Also, was snow24.com data expensive ? Feel free to drop me an email if you want to chat.

dunk commented 11 years ago

Snow data wasn't too expensive, but I signed a waiver so I can never use it commercially without obtaining a commercial licence. Nope, I don't work in the ski industry, I just got annoyed that something that seemed quite simple - a map of ski resorts with names on it - was so unobtainable. I've thought about working on this stuff in the ski industry, but while it might be fun for a bit I don't think that it's the job for me. I can tell you though that there are two areas that are ripe for development:

1) Social skiing. Like, scrobble your ski data (for instance, the stuff from snowtracks), let people connect, a ton of social stuff that's not being done at the moment. There's a lot of possibility here, and all you really need to do is apply the online social paradigm to skiing, and use the (relevant) ideas from the myriad of other social websites. 2) A better travel agent for skiing, that's data-driven. Using data like that from snow24 you could build a great interface for people to select where they want to ski, by starting with the set of all resorts and drilling it down to just a few by selecting a region (say, the Alps), a minimum height (say 2000 meters to be snow-sure), a minimum number of runs that are blue, or red, or black. Then there's all the other associated data, like a coherent set of ski maps or wiki pages about resorts with general guidance. Lots of sites seem to have this data, or at least potions of it, but nobody has put it all together into a coherent product yet. And after thinking a lot about it I think that the most likely way that you are going to be able to make that an actual profit making venture is to turn it into a sort of state-of-the-art data-driven travel agent, where you make money from commissions (it's hard to make advertising work without making sacrifices at the user's expense).

So, there you go. Lots of ideas. I just hope someone else builds them some day :-)

michaelbaudino commented 11 years ago

Thanks a lot, that's very interesting feedback. We've been working on social skiing on our website SkiWallet (French only, so far). For exemple, we can now see when and where our Facebook friends are going to ski. The "travel agent", or at least an "advanced search" is on our roadmap but not yet implemented (we're a small team of 2 developers).

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts.